Stories

My friend Pingting noting my lack of posting here wonder if I got lost in the garden. I have been busy in the garden the last few months, but I've also been writing elsewhere. One of those places is Ned.com which is a social network I like. Ned.com grew out of the Omidyar Network's experiment with social network sites to help people organize to do good. That experiment closed and Ned uses the coding of the old site. There are a few hold-overs from the Onet days there too.

I like having pages of things I'm thinking about online. My thoughts sort of go around in circles and it's nice to have pages to remind me where I was when I last took up one topic or another. I'm quite forgetful, so I also like having access to old links. These sorts of purposes work against other people engaging with what I put up. In discussion forums people expect others to say more or less on topic. Often my experience at a place like Ned.com is to be thinking about multiple threads so my comments tend to blend topics. This can be very annoying to others. But people sharing a history together, even online, has its advantages; among them is that some people are used to me and my digressions.

Recently at Ned.com a German-Palestinian national introduced a project he's embarking on. By the way the link is to a Page at WiserEarth another social networking site like Ned.com where the purpose is to connect people together for positive action. Al Saad is new to Ned.com, so I didn't want to leave one of my rambling missives on his thread, for fear of putting him off, nevertheless his project sent my mind reeling in many directions.

Al Saad after living in Germany for the last twenty years plans to return to Palestine to help catalyze the creation of a holistic green economy there. I've noticed that Al Saad mentions not infrequently that English is not his home language. I've also noticed that all of the pages he's put up in English are clear. So if you're interested to find out more about his efforts, don't let the English be a reason not to. Wael Al Saad is using online social media to connect to others, so there are plenty of ways to follow and interact with him. I think the WiserEarth page is the best place to start.

I think in stories and I think most people do. Something that stories do is to establish that something is part of a whole and meanings aren't just personal, but created by groups. When I encountered Al Saad's project two different sets of stories started spinning: Stories about Palestine. And Stories about creating a green economy.

The subject of a green economy is one that dominates the threads at Ned.com. My friend Linda Nowakowski introduced me to Buddhist Economics. Nowakowski is not Buddhist, but she had been teaching business related courses in Thailand for many years. I've heard to half-jokingly say that her mission is to take the Buddhist out of Buddhist economics. By that I think she means finding ways to relate the really good ideas contained in Buddhist economics to fellow westerners. The term Buddhist economics is related to E. F. Schumacher who wrote the popular seventies book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Schumacher's ideas are still current, not the least of the reasons for that is the work of the E. F. Schumacher Society, which has labored since 1980 to create and promote strong local economies.

Schumacher coined the term Buddhist economics, but it wasn't coming out of deep scholarship about Buddhist theology. Indeed, Schumacher himself was a late convert to Roman Catholicism. And his interest in that general direction came from time spent in India in the 1950's where he developed a keen interest in Gandhian economics. Thailand has a long Buddhist tradition, so the emergent schools of Buddhist economics there. There is a wonderful online resource Buddhist Economics by Buddhist monk Phrabhavanaviriyakhun. Even in Thailand, Buddhist economics remains part of heterodox economic thinking, nevertheless it is part of economic discussion there.

Buddhist economics interests me in large part because it turns thinking about economics towards thinking about the stories we use to make sense of things. There are plenty of posts online of scientist ruminating about religion. I'm sure that thinking scientifically is a very useful invention. My problem with the notion that people should give up on religion and take up science, or essays something like that, has not so much to do with science as it does with how I believe people think: We think in stories. The method of science is to create new knowledge by testing propositions. Yet people need to understand the world as part of a whole and religious stories create a foundation for most people. What's more because stories are socially constructed and ubiquitous in our everyday lives most of the time we don't explicitly think about the stories explicitly. People today confront great challenges. To name just a couple there's the twin challenge of peak oil and climate change cause by among other things carbon in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.

I'll be the first to admit that my recent writing at this blogs--sparse as it is--is quite awful. It doesn't hold up. I think it's part of wrestling with how we as people know. I'm convinced by science, but the stories remain. So I'm now, and have been clumsily trying to figure out some consilience between the two realms.

I do spend a lot of my time gardening. It's a bit embarrassing even with all the effort my garden looks chaotic. Some of my friends wonder why I spend so much time on flowers; Why not stuff you can eat? Part of the reason for flowers is simply serendipitous. There were areas of the property that were hard to maintain and growing stuff there seemed the easiest thing to do. I have had a long interest in organic gardening, and certainly have grown food over the years. I am also interested in permaculture. Permaculture agricultural techniques mimic natural ecologies. But permaculture is not only about growing things, it's also about culture. Part of the allure of permaculture is the sense that it's easy. There are tales of people growing all they need to live with just a few hours of labor a day. I don't really think such stories are apocryphal, but I do think it's hard work to invent and get systems like that up and running.

Agriculture with fields of one crop in neat rows mimics what happens after a fire or a flood when a more complex ecosystem is disrupted. Such monocultures aren't really sustainable over a long time. And of course monocultures are very vulnerable to being wiped out by pests and the weather. Agriculture is hard risky work and over the 10,000 years or so people have been practicing, we've come up with clever ways to deal with the risks and downsides. Permaculture seeks to make growing systems that are more durable and resilient and yet still productive. Wonderful work is being done in this direction and I'm all for it. In a way my flower beds allow me an opportunity to explore and learn about this type of growing.

Something I spend too much time on is mowing grass. I would like to move towards much less of that. But my elderly father owns this property and I'm not going to change the stories of grass in his mind. He's also got very much of a farmer's idea of how growing food is done. That's good and I've learned much from him. But to some extent his vegetable garden represents a bunch of chores I don't particularly like. In particular, I just don't get his fascination with tilling the ground so much. Anyhow, the reason I do some of my gardening activities has to do with stories. These sorts of stories are along the lines of: That's how it's done. That's what they say. Mostly we never go into the whys of neatly sheared grass or denuding the soil to grow things.

Wael Al Saad's ideas for Palestine are closely related to permaculture ideas of mimicking complex ecosystems not just in agriculture, but also in business enterprises. So part of the challenge is to find ways for people to hear these new stories without the old stories of "They say" and "That's the way it is done" precluding them.

Palestine is an ancient and holy land and the religious and political stories often work against collaborative approaches to solving problems. Indeed one of the first thoughts that popped into my head--not thoughts really--were maps and pictures of the area from a book of Children's Bible stories I had as a child. Somehow in my mind these images were yellow from age, even though I haven't seen the book in probably forty years and I have no idea whether the pages have actually yellowed. That was a big clue to me that some of my stories of Palestine are tired stereotypes. There are always real pitfalls to stereotypes, and the perceived affection for the land from childhood acculturation may be a serious pitfall. In any case thought were running as I read some of the materials Al Saad has posted.

I've become really fond of the Web site Religious Dispatches. A couple of recent articles are interesting in re stories about Palestine. The first is more obviously connected than the second, Time for Jews to Abandon the Old Foundation Myth of Israel? by Ira Chernus. It's worth reading the whole article. Chernus in part of the piece talks about the work of Brit Tezedek v'Shalom, an American peace and justice organization. The group addresses head on the foundational myths of modern Israel and explores new foundations as a way towards peace.

The second article is Disco-Reggae at Abu Ghraib: Music, the Bible and Torture. Author Erin Runions explores the question:

What does it mean when a country that likes to proclaim itself a defender of freedom plays a song about liberation to people it is torturing?

The essay perhaps isn't directly related to Palestine or Wael Al Saad's project, but is related to the foundational myths of the USA.

The 2000 presidential election in the United States was not settled immediately, so there was a period for debate. I did not vote for G. W. Bush, because he seemed quite frightening to me. At a party shortly after the election--I think, it could have been just after 9/11--an old acquaintance lit into me about my raising concerns about Bush's millenarian beliefs. I think part of the ferocity of his reaction was the sense that in making it I was being disingenuous. I was sincere about my concerns, so as the administration proceeded I was attuned to events premised on such thinking. Nonetheless even now I'm startled by some revelations of what happened dribble out. Gentleman's Quarterly's slideshow of Pentagon intelligence briefs sent to President Bush in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq surprised me. As did the fact that Bush told France’s President Jacques Chirac:

This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.

I'm not sure why I'm surprised, but the surprise is related to the cognitive dissonance that the sordid facts of torture under my flag provoke.

The "Disco-Reggae" song in Runions' piece is Rivers of Babylon (YouTube) by Boney M. Years ago I was entertaining two of my aunts with a trip to the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. We stopped to eat at the "Dirty O" a hot dog shop. The real name is the Original Hot Dog Shop, but the "Dirty O" gives hint that the place is slightly dangerous. I avoided sitting upstairs near the bar, but was still worried a little about the whole idea of eating there. The hot dogs and especially the French fries are great, so my aunties were enjoying it. Over the juke box the original Melodians rendition of "River's of Babylon" came on. One of my aunts heard "Zion" in the song and said that the song is why a grandchild is named Zion. I mentioned for the edification of the other aunt, who knows her Bible, that it was a psalm put to music--it's psalm 137. Runions points out the irony of forcing an Iraqi POW to listen to loud repetitious playings of the song:

When US interrogators chose songs with references to Babylon linking Iraq and ancient Babylon, they were also tapping into a lengthy apocalyptic tradition in which Babylon becomes a mythical figure of evil; the biblical account of Babylon conquering Judah, exiling the people of Israel, and destroying the temple has long been read as part of an enduring spiritual struggle. In the United States, Babylon is often used to represent what the nation opposes.

Yet at Abu Ghraib, the allegory of “Rivers of Babylon” works uneasily, contradictorily. In the usual pattern of apocalyptic and national biblical interpretation we would expect the ancient Israelite captives to represent the United States, under threat by Babylon. But in this case, it is the Iraqi (“Babylonian”) detainees weeping by the waters of Babylon, while US soldiers are the cruel captors.

Reason is very important to finding a way out of the mess humanity faces today, but reason alone seem insufficient. We also must become more aware of the stories which guide our lives and share new stories. Doing that is much easier said than done!

In thinking about the thread at Ned.com about Wael Al Saad's efforts to create green economies in Palestine, that's the point I wanted to make. But it took my roundabout rambling to come to the point. I'm still not sure what to write in thread because the focus is on "practical" issues. Mostly it seems raising the topic of stories seems to be a trivial concern: just stories. Still I'm convinced stories motivate much of what we do. Stories , what "they say" are fundamental to why I mow so much grass and do a hundred other things in my daily life. Stories animate our economies and determine the shape of markets. Stories lay behind why Americans torture.

Theologian Walter Wink in an essay Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence wrote:

This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today.

There surely are peacemakers who are atheist and agnostic; just as surely there are religious peacemakers. Engagement across this divide of differing perspectives is a daunting challenge. Still the importance of working towards more peaceful coexistence is so important to be motivating. And to me it seems that taking stories seriously is an essential element in building such bridges. All of us are influenced in what we do do by stories. It is essential that we engage them.

Economics and Ecology

When I first saw Linda's Nowakowski's proposal and noting that the theme for the 2009 Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions is: "Make a World of Difference: Hearing each other, Healing the earth," my thoughts turned to the words: ecology and economics. Both have at root the Greek word oikos but are quite different words. Oikos as "home" was not synonymous with "house." Oikos encompassed the land, the buildings, the produce, the slaves, the family, and a man was at the head.

Economics joins oikos with the the Greek root nomos meaning law or principle. According to Wikipedia the word economy goes back at least as far as the 15th Century but the current meaning from the 19th Century. Taking the Greek meaning of home with the metaphor of family organization with a man at the head and joining it with “law” seems revealing of how we think about economics.

Ecology begins with oikos and added to it logia meaning to speak. Ecology is the study of the interactions of living things and their natural environments. The history of the word is located roughly at the same time as the word economy--at least in the current meaning--but the assumptions about where the home is in eco are quite different. In ecology home is seen as a much a larger unit: instead of home as a political system with a man at the head, home is our planet and the biosphere in which we live.

Economics is concerned with the management of resources, the rules of the house as it were; and of course who gets to make the rules. But ecology comes out of the study of biology. Looking back at the 19th Century biology and Darwin's ideas are of great importance, but Wikipedia's article on the History of Ecology notes that Darwin never used the word. It's a very good article naming some of the contributions to the development of the field of study. Darwin theory of evolution is enormously important in discussing economics and ecology, but I'll put that off for the time being.

Over the last few posts I've thrown a lot of balls in the air, and mostly they've fallen to the ground, so it's probably not apparent I'm trying to juggle all of them. I'm trying to create a pattern of relationships with these ideas. So in the last post I introduced the construct of the great chain of being. The great chain of being is an ancient idea that intersects with modern concepts in various ways, so many ways that it gets a bit confusing. Another idea I introduced in the last post was that in studying human and behavioral sciences, I think there's a fundamental problem.

Taking a broad brush to the idea of the great chain of being it might be fair to say that the idea represents a unity between what is and our ideas of what there is. The problem of the human sciences has to do with how to speak carefully about areas of study involving human beings. In the hard sciences we speak objectively; that is we speak about objects. But in behavioral sciences the objects of our attention are subjects not mere objects. Well, that last sentence doesn't make much sense; consider the difference between a careful description of kicking a ball and kicking a dog. We can be much more sure about predictions about kicking the ball.

Historian John Lukacs has a beautiful essay Putting Man Before Descartes. He writes:

But isn’t objectivity an ideal? No: because the purpose of human knowledge—indeed, of human life itself—is not accuracy, and not even certainty; it is understanding.

Economics and Ecology both share a classical Greek root for home, but each field has a different idea of home. Economics is very materially focused and in how stuff is managed and allocated. Both fields are influenced by scientific ideas of the time. But in a sense the laws that economics are concerned with are political and therefore different from the notion of laws of science.

Both economics and biology are steeped in materialism, a view that "the only thing which can be proven to exist is matter." If all that exists is matter, then we can talk about objects, we can attain a sort of objectivity. Lukacs points out that subject and objects are so intertwined that objectivity is more challenging to attain than we often suspect:

There may be dualities in our reactions, but—more important—there is increasing evidence that, ever since Descartes and others, the dual division of the world into objects and subjects, into known and knower, is no longer valid. And such evidence is not only there in the so-called humanities, but, during the general crisis at the end of the 20th century, in physics, too, involving the very study of matter.

In the short video clip I pointed to where E.F. Schumacher responds to the question: "Can Buddhist Economics work in the West?" Schumacher said:

There's no virtue [or] value, in maximizing consumption. You want to maximize satisfactions. And you want to get your satisfactions with a minimum of consumption.

Here's economics from a perspective of qualities versus quantities. It's not at all clear that most economists think this a proper perspective. They believe that economics ought to be the objective study of objects. They think economics is all about stuff. Nevertheless, it's hard to conduct a field of study which has so many political ramifications from a purely objective stance. The situation vis a vis subject and object in biology is less contentious and an objective stance hardly questioned. But as Lukacs points out in his essay, it's not just the Humanities, but even physics contending with the problem of the relationship between knower an known.

In my last post I pointed to Gregory Bateson and his observation that Lamarck was the first scientist to invert the great chain of being. Bateson wrote:

The Lamarckian biosphere was still a chain. The unity of epistemology was retained in spite of a shift in emphasis from transcendent Logos to immanent mind.

The great chain of being is important to epistemology, a theory of knowledge. It also speaks to ontology, or a theory of existence. I often get epistemology and ontology confused. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy. Ontology is part of another branch of philosophy named metaphysics. Materialism represents certain metaphysical commitments.

Epistemology is important to economics and ecology as fields of study. Because of the political nature of economics difficulties presented by knower/known dualities come up enough so they're hard to ignore. But one would expect that the rules of knowledge would apply regardless of the field, at least in some fundamental ways. But metaphysics commitments impinge on epistemology in interesting ways. The story of the great chain of being is one way to examine these intersections.

A gathering of people of various religions represents numerous differencing stances on metaphysics. In order to discuss a response to our ecological crisis, it seems to me that differences cannot be simply set aside. It seems particularly important to know how science views what exists. Likewise some agreements about how we know are required for responsibility for our planetary home. Surely there will be many areas of disagreement among people, what of the essence is to identify areas in which we can agree.

Tree Hugger

“Tree Hugger” has pejorative connotations; a tree hugger isn't in step with the economic program. Over the weekend I went to a party in an urban neighborhood. Pittsburgh is a hilly place and because of the geography neighborhoods are often little enclaves. Behind this house are two paper streets on paper, but never developed because there was mining underneath years ago and the danger of subsidence made building untenable. So in my friend's back yard and beyond is an urban forest. Dominating the view is a huge Black Locust tree, a fairly common native species here. I've never seen a more perfect specimen.

The tree inspired awe and affection in me, and my gushing about it among other things prompted a friend to remark about me approximately:

“You say you don't believe in God, but you tell stories like this. Sooner or later don't you think the stories fit together in a pattern that belies your profession 'There is no God?'”

Posts at Keith Hart's blog The Memory Bank are always though provoking. Hart is anthropologist and looks closely at economics through that lens. In his recent post about speculation in the art market, Hart writes:

My favourite definition of religion is Durkheim’s, the attempt to build meaningful bridges between the known and the unknown, between everyday life and the disasters that lie in wait for all of us, especially death.

In my study of the human and behavioral sciences, way back my early days in college, I became increasingly sure there was a fundamental problem about them, a rather philosophical problem about how we think about objects and subjects. Identifying the problem in this way points to the territory Durkheim stakes out for religion: building meaningful bridges between the known and unknown. And turns attention towards the meaningful bridges between knower and known.

Anyhow, about this sense that there's something fundamentally missing in the human studies, the work of Gregory Bateson has provided me with a reference and a guide since my college days in the 1970's. He was British and trained in British school, but worked during his career in the United States. He was an anthropologist, and also in on the beginnings of the development cybernetics.

The issue I'm dancing around goes by many names which are pairs; partial listing of pairs would include: mind/body, form/substance, subject/object. German philosophers had much to say about the topic of these pairs and their relations; American and British philosophers too. Bateson was a bit idioscyratic in the ways he talked about everything. When it comes to this general subject, partly his way of talking has to do with the British and American schools of philosophy, and part his unique insights.

Stewart Brand's inspiration for the first Whole Earth Catalog were the writings and ideas of Buckminster Fuller. Gregory Bateson the inspiration for the Whole Earth Epilog. It's hard to imagine today that catalogs printed on newsprint would be influential to a generation of Americans, but these were indeed. Yet I've never really met anyone much interested in Gregory Bateson. Among those I've talked to interested in the problem of human studies have been more steeped in German philosophy or various stripes of post-modernism. It seems people come to the topic of objects and subjects with very different frames with particular vocabularies. Whenever I bring up Bateson, I seem to get into a muddle.

In thinking about “Why Buddhism?” an observation that Bateson makes in the introductory chapter of his book Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity seems important. Bateson wrote:

I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake...

A part of the stroy of our loss of the sense of unity has been elegantly told in Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being, which traces the story from classical Greek philosophy to Kant and the beginnings of German idealism in the eighteenth century. This is the story of the idea that the world is/was timelessly created upon deductive logic. The idea is clear in the epigraph from The City of God. Supreme Mind, or Logos, is at the head of the deductive chain. Below that are the angels, then people, then apes, and so on down to the plants and stones. All is in deductive order and tied into that order by a premise which prefigures our second law of thermodynamics. The premise asserts that the "more perfect" can never be generated by the "less perfect."

I found online a page of a handout for a philosophy class taught by Peter Suber. Suber has organized the claims of the great chain of being to show how they fit together to form a single large argument.

Bateson points out that in the history of Biology that Lamark was the first to invert the great chain of being. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is mostly known for Lamarkian errors of the heritability of acquired characteristics. Nevertheless Lamarck's theory of "tranformism" presaged Darwin's theory of evolution. Bateson was concerned with epistemology, a branch of philosophy which deals with the theory of knowledge. He was interested that what he said contained fewer epistemological errors. He doesn't follow the logical argument of the great chain of being, nor an inverted form. Rather he points to them to show a hierarchic structure of thought. Steeped in Anglo-British philosophy he relies on Bertrand Russell's Theory of Logical Types.

A sort of a recap of my recent ramblings over my last few posts:

A friend who is very knowledgeable wrote a proposal to do a session at the Council for a Parliament of the World's Religions on Buddhist economics. She opened up the process of making the proposal online. I wrote some of my thoughts about it, but they didn't come together. So I thought to break my writing into parts here to see whether I could get the parts to hang together better. I began this with the post Why Buddhism?

I mentioned a post at Religious Dispatches about America's oldest man, as well as E.F. Schumacher's essay "Buddhist Economics." Two anecdotes don't make a trend, but it seemed enough to frame a question why Christians would use Buddhism to explain something. While I am genuinely curious about this, posing the question really was rhetorical, a means to begin speculating wildly. I don't know much so clearly anything I say falls into the "for what it's worth category."

For what it's worth, my hunch is part of the reason why Christians turn to Buddhism to explain something has to do with skirting around the deductive logic of the great chain of being.

In religion and philosophy distinctions are of great importance, so it takes a great deal of skill and study to negotiate these areas. About how we think and how we make are lives meaningful are questions everyone ponders and have something to say about. When discussions about religion and philosophy come up there's a tension between insisting on important distinctions and a spirit of tolerance which enables conversation across differences.

I know my friend Linda Nowakowski, who's deeply immersed in the study of Buddhist economics is very careful about making distinctions. And she very much people with differencing views to speak to each other, hence the effort to make a proposal for the Council for a Parliament of World's Religions.

Economics like other human studies has to contend with the problem of subject and object. That's a problem religions address too. The intersection of interest around this problem makes me want to persist in laying out my views, even when I see that my writing isn't making much sense, and is boring. For better or worse I plan to explore this line of thinking in future posts.

Why Buddhism?

There's a charming piece up at Religion Dispatches, Buddha Mind, American Style where Louis Ruprecht, Jr. looks at the wisdom of American's oldest living man through the lens of Buddhism. I presume that America's oldest man, Walter Breuning is at least nominally a Christian. Ruprecht from observing his other writing probably is too. So it's curious to me how Buddhism is used to make sense of Breuning's philosophy of life.

The picture is a screen capture from a video of a question and answer session in 1977 where E. F. Schumacher responds to the question:

Do you believe that Buddhist economics will work in the West?

Schumacher said that he might as well have called his book "Christian Economics" as "Buddhist Economics." I think he was being flip. His book "An economics of permanence/Buddhist economics" was published in 1975, and in 1974 his book "The age of plenty: A Christian view" was published. I haven't read either! I don't know what Schumacher's religious views were; he seems to me a humanist and ecologist. I think his attention to religious views was born out of his compassionate interest in people and his intention to fit economic decisions with religious ideas so that we might think with compassion (with passion) about economics.

It appears that Buddhism provided the easier fit for Schumacher as well as for Ruprecht than Christianity. Obviously trying to get into their heads as to why is a wildly speculative endeavor.

It doesn't seem so far fetched to imagine how to make story fit with Christianity. Perhaps Buddhism fits more easily because Buddhism doesn't require the transcendent mind and is compatible with immanent mind. There are various flavors of Creation Spirituality, and other attempts to create theologies compatible with immanent mind, but these notions often seem heretical to established religious order. Invoking Buddhism is a quick and dirty way of skirting around this theological problem.

E. F. Schumacher seems to have been a very kind-hearted man. It's something that he preferred to be interned in a British prison than to live under a Nazi regime at home. The notion within economics that labor is a commodity seems to have offended his sense of propriety. People are not the same and neither are their circumstances and an economics that doesn't take that into account seemed flawed. It's curious to me that his work in India would lead him to make this points about economics through Buddhism rather than though Hinduism, or even Marxist critique. Perhaps at least part of the reason to choose Buddhism was that the ideas were just familiar enough for recognition, but distant enough to avoid theological controversy.

Schumacher embraced an ecological view; a view that places change in focus. He was also a refugee from fascism, so knew firsthand that ideology necessarily has real world consequences. He knew that ideas matter. Schumacher embraced a scientific view which up-ended the traditional hierarchy with God at the top. There is a long history to Western science intertwined with the history of ideas.

I do not mean to suggest that E. F. Schumacher is the be all and end all of Buddhist economics. Certainly that isn't the case. Buddhist economic ideas are widespread, and not surprisingly many of the top scholars in this school of economics are Buddhists. Nevertheless Buddhist economics has an appeal to people outside Buddhism. Schumacher coined the term in 1955 and returned to and developed the idea in the years after. Casually searching I found a recent article in The Hindu Business Line, Give Buddhist economics a try. The essay that the author of that piece mentions collected in Schumacher's well-known book Small Is Beautiful can be found here.

Buddhism offers a way to critique modern materialism. That seems interesting and important, but it also seems a good idea to look in the Western traditions for critiques as well.

It's very commonly heard in the USA that our founding fathers intended this to be a Christian nation. When it's pointed out that many of the "founding fathers" were in fact deists, it seems mostly the point is glossed over as a distinction without a difference. In philosophy distinctions are quite important, which is one reason I have such a hard time getting a handle discovering broad outlines. Nevertheless, the Age of Enlightenment marks a boundary of great significance to the development of Western culture. From that Wikipedia article:

Historian Peter Gay asserts the Enlightenment broke through "the sacred circle,"[8] whose dogma had circumscribed thinking.

It seems that mentioning this break is something we're afraid to do. We appear to imagine that not mentioning religion is a sort of tolerance of religion.

Buddhists are among the contributers to Buddhist economics. Certainly it makes sense to approach Buddhist economics from that perspective. But it also makes sense to get to the essential ideas, especially if Buddhist economics is used to critique other schools of economic thought. For Buddhist economics to be important in the West, the history of Western thought provides necessary context. In broad outlines the history of how we in the West have changed our minds about God ought not to be missed.

"I Tame Beavers"

Pinting wanted to know more about my raccoon problem, but there really isn't a good story about it. There's a raccoon which has taken up residence in the upstairs of that barn where there's a lot of stuff. The raccoon has made a mess of things and I've been avoiding the problem for a long time. The best suggestion I've seen is to lay out ammonia soaked rags. I've done nothing but ignore the animal. The best thing is the raccoon mostly tries to keep clear of me when I'm up in the barn. I see it but we don't exchange glances. My fear is getting bit on my butt.

The title of this post comes directly from an article from the March 1968 Yankee. An electrical engineer tells in his own words how he's gotten the beavers on his property to eat out of his hand. Beavers fell trees with their sharp teeth to build dams and houses made from logs and mud. Beavers look rather cute, see this photo by krrrista at Flickr. But I'm sure I'd think long and hard before putting food in my hand to entice a beaver to eat--yikes! Raccoons can be very cute, but this photo by nal from maimi at Flickr is precisely why I want to avoid too intimate interactions with the one in the barn.

There's a good selection of Yankee magazines from 1968. That was such a pivotal year in my life. As it's now forty years on, I've been thinking quite a bit about 1968 and the aftermath all year long. One of the ways is to read writing from the sixties. One of the best books I read this year was The Secular City by Harvey Cox. I really enjoyed reading David Hajdu's Lives and times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina entitled Positively 4th Street. I was 13 in 1968, but I still keep wondering what the heck happened because there was such a sense at the time that the times were changing. Of course they were, just not in ways I would have predicted.

Today I was thinking about muddling along and pulled a book off my self, Muddling Toward Frugality: A Blueprint for Survival in the 1980's by Warren Johnson. Clearly that book is not from the sixties, rather it was published in 1979, but goes to my question: What happened? I can find no listings for the book on the various used book sources online, it's just such a period piece I guess nobody thinks to save it. Nonetheless the ideas in the book are still important.

The book was published by Shambhala Publications and I remember being impressed with it in those days. I also remember a friend laughing and saying something like, "Only you would love a book called Muddling Toward Frugality!" Alas I haven't been very good about putting my convictions into actions. Over the last couple of years by way of the Internet I've met Linda Nowakowski. She's in Thailand, but is from my neck of the wood. Just a bit older than me, she also experienced the sense of transformative change that seemed pervasive back in the days and which has been such a subject of fascination for me of late. However, I'm sure Linda never followed my wastrel ways. She's a great student of Buddhist economics, something I'd not heard of until I met her online.

Johnson's preface begins:

If we are to enjoy this planet for a long time, we may as well face the fact that trying to perpetuate the affluent society is going to be an uphill struggle.

An early chapter in the book is "An Ecological View of History." That chapter helped to bring together a more cohesive view of ecology. I was familiar with Hans Zinsser's famous book Rats, Lice and History along with extensions of Rachel Carson's work on pesticides steming from Silent Spring. But I hadn't really put together an ecological view of history that is a widespread idea nowadays, before Muddling. Many have read Jared Diamond's, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. But back at the cusp of the 1980's an ecological view of history was something a specialist would adopt and not so widely understood as it is now.

Linda Nowakowski is busy helping organize The 2nd International conference of the Buddhist Economics Research Platform which will be held at Ubon Ratchathani University, Warin Chamrab, Ubon Ratchathani Thailand Dec. 5-7, 2008. So there's lots of current work for me to acquaint myself with, although the main thing is that I ought to straighten up and start walking my talk better.

Sokari at Black Looks recently linked to an Utne Reader list of 50 Visionaries who are changing your world. It's a cool list, remarkable people all, but in going down the list I was excited to see brownfemipower on it. I do enjoy blogs very much. I can say some unbelievably stupid things sometimes and I know it. The intersection of race and feminism is once place where I might get called out on my foolishness. I've learned to do a lot more listening and less talking in those sorts of places. Being called out is of course a way to learn; the trouble is, while I may be stupid I don't like to cause distress to others. Blundering in is not the best strategy. Learning not to be ignorant and callous towards others are high on my agenda.

I was tickled pink that brownfemipower was on the list. And while I was over there savoring her blog, it's always a time for putting on my thinking cap, what was perhaps a throw away line brought something in focus about myself. She wrote:

it’s working through ideas that i’ve been struggling with for a long time, and it’s doing through my ADD lens rather than my logical make sense lens

"ADD lens," by golly I know that lens! It would behoove me to learn a bit more about my "logical make sense lens," but that will have to wait for another time. Meanwhile if you're looking for some great stuff, I highly recommend checking out Utne visionary, brownfemipower.